


If You Ever Touch That Wall

by lazaefair



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:16:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazaefair/pseuds/lazaefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate Universe: Holmes, Watson and Simza are not able to stop Moriarty in Switzerland, the world descends into war, and Moriarty has it out for Holmes. He captures Holmes, and things proceed about like you expect.</p><p>Written for the kinkmeme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt:](http://shkinkmeme.livejournal.com/9194.html?thread=21204458#t21204458) "tl;dr: AU in which Moriarty wins, amasses immense power and takes Holmes as his unwilling bed-warmer, fucking with Holmes expectations by being a surprisingly attentive (though still clearly deranged) lover."
> 
> I will finish this someday. Eventually. It's all plotted out, I just have to do the actual writing part.

He has his dinner on the main terrace. 

The white-jacketed waiter, Bones, lays his plate in front of him. A succulent roast, new vegetables, savory sauce. Fresh bread in a basket, creamy butter to spread on it. Snowy-white napkin on his lap. Magnificent mountain vista before his eyes, gilded with a sunset just in its beginning stages. 

The plate gleams incongruously in the golden light, belying its stiff paper construction. They took the china plates away the night after he tried smashing one and attacking the guards with the shards. He sips his wine - a fine old vintage, perfectly paired with the roast - from a paper cup. They took the wineglasses away the same evening, for the same reason.

He can still do something with the paper, if he wishes. He can ball it up and force it down his throat and die of suffocation. But even if the guards do not revive him first… _he's too fond of himself,_ Watson once said of him, and it is bitterly true. 

He hasn't seen a utensil in nearly two years. Every single meal for six hundred ninety-two days has been considerately sliced into pieces suitable for consumption only using the fingers. Porridge had presented a unique challenge, but he'd managed. It doesn't even bring an ironic smile to his face these days, knowing that they had never been stupid enough to give him anything so lethal as a knife and fork and spoon. 

Bones stands patiently nearby, with a candle in hand for when the light fails. A guard accompanies him now, after the night he tried wresting the candle away - not that Bones needs the assistance much, having evidently been trained in numerous combative arts himself. 

He eats the roast and vegetables slowly. Magnificent cooking, as always. "Give my compliments to the chef," he says to Bones. The waiter inclines his head in response. He suspects that any irony he used to address his silent jailers had probably drained away from his tone somewhere by the first year, but he is too tired to care. 

Bones lays another paper cup in front of him, filled with an exquisitely constructed trifle. He licks the pudding off his fingers with perfunctory relish, his eyes fixed on the gorgeous flares of crimson and peach and gold in the sky, limning the snowy mountaintops which surround the chalet.

When he is finished, he wipes himself clean, places the napkin on the table, and leaves it for Bones and the guard to clear. For four hundred thirty-one days, they would not allow him to leave the dining area until the guards had accounted for every item on the table. They no longer take this precaution.

He has not tried to escape in three hundred twenty-nine--no, three hundred thirty days, now.


	2. Chapter 2

They went to the Secret Service Bureau, in the beginning. Italy, France, those damnable Habsburgs, Spain, Russia - falling headlong over each other to declare war like particularly ferocious dominoes. Even dear England, tied to a hundred years of treaties and threats and promises, would not escape. What could a doctor, a gypsy, and an independent consulting detective do against the weight of history?

"It had the professor's fingerprints all over it," Holmes said, pushing yet another small stack of newspaper clippings across Mr. Smith's cluttered desk. "Not literally, of course. But you see - here - after twenty years of marriage it's unfathomable that Mrs. Hodges would take it into her head to flaunt the affair so openly, yet flaunt she did. Which, of course, drove the grief-maddened Mr. Hodges into the metaphorical arms of Mr. Dawlish and his steel mills. Subtle, accurate, and sordid: hallmarks of the professor all over."

Mr. Smith beetled his thick brows together. "These are very powerful people you're implicating, gentlemen. And your evidence of all this is?"

Watson's knees brushed Holmes's as they crowded together in the tiny office. "The detective would have needed years to gather sufficient evidence for every single one of these cases, that would stand up in a court," Watson finally said. "That he deduced this much based on six months' work is nothing short of astonishing."

Holmes didn't even preen at the compliment, which was worrying.

Mr. Smith sighed. "And yet, you'd have me spend the public purse to pursue, what, unrelated scandals linked together by someone you say you don't have evidence for. At a time of impending war, no less."

"The war is precisely why you must act," Holmes said.

"This Mrs. Hodges," Mr. Smith picked up the first clipping. "I don't mind saying that we did have our eye on that family, for reasons I can't disclose. How did you deduce so exactly and quickly what happened, when our years of surveillance caught nothing?"

Watson and Holmes shared a look. "Because the woman who seduced Mrs. Hodges is...was known to Holmes," Watson said when Holmes wouldn't. "Irene Adler was her real name. She admitted to working for Professor Moriarty during the Blackwood case. Her, ah, style was familiar to us."

Mr. Smith frowned. "So you admit a known connection to the professor, through this Adler woman?"

"Ye-es," Holmes said, his eyes straying to Watson’s again.

"That won't look good, you'll have to admit," Mr. Smith said. Neither man contradicted him. Smith heaved another sigh. "But…damn it all if I don't think you have something here. I can't promise anything. My superiors won't like it, I can tell you right now. The professor being friends with the prime minister, and all that."

"Understood," Holmes said quickly. "These cases are the easiest cases for the Bureau to confirm through your ample resources. I have dozens more I am capable of presenting, if your superiors wish."

"Thank you, Mr. Holmes," Mr. Smith said, already preoccupied. "I'll see what I can do."

Outside in the street, Watson clapped him (gently) on the arm. "It'll be all right, old boy," he said. "If the SSB believes us, they'll confirm what we've said within a few days."

"Let us hope with all the virtue at our disposal." 

Three days later, Holmes woke to the sight of innumerable red strings in his field of vision and the sound of Mrs. Hudson ushering someone (deep voice, clean soap scent, heavy tread - Clarky, then) into the sitting room beyond the curtain. 

“Mr. Holmes? Clarky to see you, sir.”

“Thank you, Nanny,” Holmes called back. Deep gloom meant extremely early in the morning. Possibly even still in the middle of the night. The red strings trembled infinitesimally from his voice. Connections upon connections, all far too late. Clarky shifting uncomfortably. Boards creaking.

He stood, cracked his neck painfully, and shuffled through the curtain.

Clarky was in mufti. That was the first worrying sign. The man practically lived in his uniform in normal times.

“Mr. Holmes...I’ve bad news. ” He looked tormented.

“Let me essay a small hypothesis. The Yard has issued a warrant for my arrest.”

“The orders came in last night - early this morning, I should say. How did you know?” 

“I had my suspicions.” Three days of no response from the Secret Service Bureau. More ominously, no useful intelligence from his sources in the Yard, the Irregulars, or the prime minister’s office. Signs of a systematic blackout on information. Holmes had started packing on the third day.

“What will you do?” Clarky worried the hat in his hands. Nervous tic. More accustomed to holding a helmet. 

“The less you know, the better off you’ll be.” Holmes scrubbed a hand over his face. “Thank you for the warning.”

Now the man looked positively panicked. “Off you go now,” Holmes added, for Clarky’s benefit. “We wouldn’t want Lestrade to miss you when he misses so many other things, now would we?”

_later_

“The doctor isn’t -- ‘ere, who do you think -- COME BACK HERE, YOU--!” The maid’s shouts pursued Holmes all the way into the sitting room, where Dr. Watson sat in consultation with some luxuriantly mustachioed gentleman. A pity said mustache was immediately eclipsed by the truly prodigious one currently presiding over Holmes’s upper lip, but those were life’s cruel vicissitudes. 

“What--” Watson looked up, astonished, on his feet. “Who on earth--” he started, then looked closer. “--That is, ah, Mr. Seeney, I didn’t expect you today.”

“I need to speak with you. Urgently.” Holmes hesitated. He cranked himself down with an effort. “After you’re finished with your appointment, of course.” 

“We were just finishing up, weren’t we, doctor?” Mustache Gentleman said, clearly discomfited.

Watson was looking at Holmes helplessly. “If you’re sure, Mr. Willoughby.” 

When Willoughby was gone, Holmes said, “Where’s Mary?”

“Tutoring Charlie Coleridge. At her _job_ , Holmes. What is this about? We haven’t seen you for three days.”

“We need to speak somewhere more secure. Private.”

Watson closed his mouth on his gathering questions. “My study, then.”

Their footsteps rang loudly in Holmes’s ears on the short walk to the study. He should have taken some--no, he’d needed clear faculties for the morning’s work. And Watson would have known. “Here.”

“What is this?” Watson looked down at the papers Holmes handed him.

“Those are tickets to the SS Audrey. It leaves for America first thing tomorrow morning. You and Mary _must_ be on that ship. Wearing these.” Holmes thrust a packed valise into the doctor’s hands. It jingled suspiciously.

Watson opened it and surveyed the clothing inside. “Ah. You would have Mary as a painted whore and me as her pimp? Excellent plan,” he said, dry as the desert.

“As a freewheeling _gypsy_ with her _loyal companion_ , thank you,” Holmes sniffed. He gave Watson the other valise. “Cosmetics, jewelry and wigs are in this bag. You must both pile all of it on. The more people notice your voluminous accessories, the less they will notice _you_ when you shed them.” He held out a much-folded packet of papers. “Your instructions for survival. Follow them to the letter.”

“I’m not totally unacquainted with subterfuge, Holmes, I followed you for years, remember?” Watson said, raising his eyebrows. “You must be really worried for me, old cock, if you’re forgetting such elementary facts.”

“I forget nothing, mother hen,” Holmes said with dignity, despite his mustache. “Just promise me you’ll be on that ship.”

The small grin hovering around the corner of Watson’s mouth vanished slowly. “This isn’t just about fleeing a coming war, is it.”

“I can’t tell you where I’m going,” Holmes said by way of reply. He wandered to the window. “If you don’t know, you can’t be questioned about it.” He distractedly scanned for suspicious persons and too-casual loiterers. The street looked normal. Behind him, Watson closed the valise and set it on a table. 

“What happened, Holmes.”

He closed his eyes. “Scotland Yard has issued a warrant for my arrest.” 

Watson drew a sharp breath. “Moriarty.”

“Yes.”

“But I thought, after our--the assassination in Switzerland--”

“After _my failure_ ,” Holmes said deliberately. He pictured Watson’s wince in his mind. “I thought that I was no longer of any importance to Moriarty, having been unable to--after I _failed_ to stop him. That we no longer figured into his plans. This indicates otherwise.”

“But what could he possibly want with us now? What threat do you represent to him? The war machine is fairly set in motion.”

“We know of his existence, for one. We saw the factories. He may fear that I will lead or cause a subversive movement. His position is not completely solidified, yet.”

A small silence. Watson broke it by rummaging in a desk drawer. “Do you think our leaving tomorrow morning is soon enough?”

Holmes opened his eyes. Daylight flooded in and dispelled memories of a train, red soldier’s uniforms, smoke and blood and Watson desperately firing down the corridor. “The arrest warrant only has my name on it. They’ll expect me to run. _You_ and Mary must behave as if you suspect nothing. See to your patients. Carry on perfectly normally right up to the moment when you disappear.”

“All right, Holmes.”

Pen scratching across paper. More rustling. Holmes turned around, but Watson was looking straight at him. For the first time since he walked through the front door, Holmes allowed himself to see the worry and love and sadness in Watson’s eyes. 

“I’ll be going now, Watson.” His voice was a scratch in his throat. 

“Will we see you again?” Watson’s fingertips were going white from his grip on the pen.

Holmes looked away first. “It’s far too early to speculate, old boy.” 

“Not even enough for an insouciant parting shot,” Watson murmured. 

“I’m afraid I’m fresh out of jolly good spirits today,” Holmes said, and looked at his shoes.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Come here, Holmes.” 

Holmes went. 

Shakespeare was wrong, as usual. Parting is a bitter sorrow, always.


	3. Chapter 3

On the six hundred ninety-fourth day, he receives his twentieth and twenty-first visitors, respectively. They arrive together just before noon, their horses clattering noisily in the receiving courtyard two stories below the bedroom balcony. He passes his eye over the next sentence in his book. Voices drift up. Bones comes out to greet them.

“...I say, isn’t this going a bit far? Surely, he can’t be that deranged...”

“...must carry out the strictest instructions, sir.” Bones’s voice is good-natured but implacable, the practiced tones of a servant respectfully dealing with simpletons. “No one is to visit him without first changing into safe clothing. He’s an accomplished pickpocket and a dangerous prisoner. It’s for your own protection, you see.”

“Please, do change with all haste, m’lord William,” the new, female voice floats through warm summer air. Slight German or Austrian lilt. Cultured. “I want to see him for myself, soon. And it all looks presentable and clean. Isn’t it?”

“We thoroughly launder these clothes after every visit, madam.” Bones’s voice carries mild affront without actually tipping over into reproving.

Listening from above, he can’t keep the corners of his mouth from twitching. It is a lovely day, and the breeze ruffles his own simple cotton shirt and pants, sun-warmed stone against his bare feet. He has worn variations of this white, pocketless outfit for six hundred eighty-five days, the sole inmate in his asylum of one.

He glances over the edge to observe the latest guests. The man, presumably William, has the thickening look of the comfortable forties. He holds himself stiffly: doesn’t take to traveling or unfamiliar situations very well. Values his dignity above most things. The unnamed lady has dark hair and red lips visible even from two stories - wearing an elaborately structured dress, high-necked and bustled within an inch of its chiffoned life. Irene would have approved. It has been seven days since he last thought of Irene. He ignores the pang.

Bones piles stacks of pale cotton and linen into their arms. “I still fail to see why you’re not even allowing me a simple pocket knife,” William complains.

“Any weapon you carry can be used against you,” Bones says, and William is quite silenced by the flatness of his tone.

The lady ignores the exchange and shakes out the dress in her arms. “My word, this _is_ cut rather close. It will cling terribly, I think."

"If madam would like another robe--"

"No, I am content with this one. Perhaps the gentleman in the castle will enjoy it." She delivers this statement so blandly that even Bones pauses uncertainly. 

On the balcony, he tilts his head back and taps his lips. A studied innocence so coy as to be outrageous, hiding the sly edge to everything she says: she has some intelligence and manages the people around her to her satisfaction. It remains to be seen whether that is mere animal cunning or a genuine intellect that exploits the usual strictures of society to its advantage. 

Bones leads them inside and the mountainside becomes quiet again. _For I’ve heard tell that Fortune, as they call her, is a drunken and capricious woman and, worse still, blind,_ Cervantes advises him, and he turns the page. 

When he descends to the dining room at noon, the table is set for three - paper plates, paper cups, cloth napkins, shaped paper bowl full of tea. Perhaps one day his jailers will discover celluloid. Until then, some enterprising Swiss papiermacher is very happy. He looks forward idly to the spectacle of William dining with his fingers.

William (or, it turns out, Baron William March Chesterford) performs to expectation. For that matter, so does _Fräulein_ Anna Weiss. 

It transpires that the simple linen dress she donned does cling terribly. It beautifully outlines hip and breast and waist, which means, of course, that it also fulfills its required duty of discouraging attempts to spirit any weapons or useful items into his prison. She poses herself to her advantage, and the tense line of Chesterford’s neck says he notices it, too.

“You are joking,” the good baron says, glaring at the table-full of paper settings. His close-cut linen suit shows him off somewhat less pleasing to the eye.

“I assure you, one becomes quite accustomed to this style of dining in the fullness of time,” he replies, sliding into a chair. “I imagine your intrepid guide fully disclosed the harrowing conditions under which we all live in these primitive mountains.” He shakes out the napkin. Faced with this reality, they have no choice but to sit down. He troubles not to begin the conversation, as befits the _dangerous_ gentleman of _leisure_ that he is.

Bones serves them. They eat. Fräulein Weiss smiles at him as he deliberately picks shreds of cold joint from his teeth. Chesterford glares at his own plate and gingerly pokes through the slices.

“How delightful,” Weiss trills. She faces him squarely.

“What is, pray?”

“Meeting you at last, Mr. Holmes. I read your Doctor Watson’s novels with _such_ excitement, I must confess. I became something of an _enthusiast._ ”

His expression does not change. Deliberately assuming the role of the simpering ingenué: does she seek to test him? The mention of Watson either arises from calculated provocation or ignorance. He blinks away the echoes of his first meeting with Mary. “How remarkable. I was not aware that the doctor’s writings had made their way across the continent.”

“Oh, but a true aficionado seeks to _support_ her idol in any way she can, no matter the obstacle.”

He raises an eyebrow and eats a piece of carrot. She shapes her lips around a cream puff and looks back at him through mascara-lined lashes. 

He knows his visitors know exactly who he is. Moriarty enjoys showing his former nemesis off to favored dignitaries and elites of the new world order. It would, in fact, be a social coup for Weiss to seduce the only man who nearly defeated the Professor, but at the moment she is only playing at a parody of seduction.

“And you, milord?” He turns to Chesterford. “Are you likewise an admirer of my exploits? Have you come to observe the tiger in his lair?”

Chesterford swallows hastily and coughs. “Yes, well, certain people in, ah, certain circles have heard quite a lot about you. Can’t say that I’m quite as interested as Miss Weiss: she wanted an escort and why, I thought I’d accompany her.”

“Nonetheless, I am quite flattered.” He curls his lip in a fleeting smile. “It isn’t every day that I receive visitors of such distinguished economic note. How is the steelmaking business coming along, by the way? Flourishing as the machinery of war hums along, I suppose.”

Chesterford frowns at him, but doesn’t deny his deduction. “Splendidly, yes. Though I expect the Americans will fall soon enough and business will resume its previous course.”

“On the contrary. Reconstruction can be exploited just as handsomely as its predecessor.”

“Please, let’s stay away from talk of war,” Weiss interjects. “It’s tiresome and only leads to strife." She blinks guilelessly into the pointed silence.

The meal drags on and he tells them a story from his former life to keep them quiet. Whatever game Weiss is playing, she can make do with warmed-over retellings from one of John's earliest novels. They retire to the library, where he endures the exclamations of "oh, how cunning" over the curtained reading nook and the awkward silences when they realize all the furniture is bolted down and most of the books are chained to the shelves. He does not enlighten them as to why - Chesterford is not interested and Weiss likely knows already.

It's almost a relief when Chesterford disappears, muttering about the return trip, and Weiss finally corners him deep between two shelves.

"I would have expected more fluttering eyelashes, Fräulein," he says, not moving.

Weiss actually pouts, but her hand stays on his trouser buttons. "I've never met a man who was more churlish about his seduction."

"Your French mother would be disappointed, I'm sure. Or is it grandmother?" he adds when she arches a plucked eyebrow.

"Grandmother on my father's side. But my ancestry has nothing to do with _your_ behavior."

"First, I will remind you that we are not alone. Second, I must say that even if we had somehow fallen into that particular happy circumstance, I would still regretfully refuse."

She slides her hands over his pants, smooths her thumbs on his hips. "How strange. I was led to believe that you were a man of…certain appetites." She leans closer and breathes into his shirt collar.

He catches her hands. "What does he want?"

Her body stills. He can feel her lashes sweeping up his neck.

“How did you know?”

“Moriarty enjoys leaving his, shall we say, stamp on the unfortunates around him.”

She smiles into his skin. “He would take that as a compliment.”

“I know. I ask again, what does he want?”

“Of you? You already know.”

No cruelty like a woman’s whose seduction has been foiled, or a spy who has been exposed. Of course, she is not exerting herself much, which is curious.

“Sherlock Holmes,” she drags his name out in her throaty German voice, and he closes his eyes. It has been three hundred days since he claimed that name in his thoughts. “He sent me to tell you that he would allow this. A gift.”

“A test.”

“A boon, freely given,” she insists, and kisses the skin on his jaw, open-mouthed.

“A boon that I would refuse even if I trusted the giving of it.” He knows she will report every word of this to Moriarty. He curls his hands into fists, squeezes her fingers against him.

“Then,” she says, only a little breathless, “he instructed me to give you this, directly from him.” She kisses him full on the mouth. It is not chaste, but gentle for all its passion. She is soft and smooth, and smells of travel and perfume, and he shuts his eyes against clashing sense-memories of a beard, and teeth, and blood. 

When Weiss pulls away, she smiles with an air of finality. “Well done, Mr. Holmes. I had thought - but no matter. I would have enjoyed my evening with you, but I accept it is not to be.” 

He is repulsed by the sympathy in her eyes. A year ago, he would have sought to exploit it. Something twists in his chest. 

“Guard,” he says. They both hear the soft shuffle by the door. “The lady is finished here. Good afternoon, madam.”

She bows her head. She lets him go.


	4. Chapter 4

He didn’t even dare to stay in London long enough to see Watson and Mary off on the SS Audrey - he was out of the city by evening. The chase lasted nearly eight months: stinking garret apartments, fleabitten hostels, heaps of alley garbage, three innocents dead, clenched teeth and dirty stitches, one slow freezing afternoon hiding in dead wheat fields playing mouse to Sebastian Moran’s cat. He joined the gypsies. He actually rode a horse while fleeing the battlefront in Poland. They found him on the outskirts of Rome. 

“Holmes,” Simza hissed. “Holmes, they’re here!”

She shook his shoulder again, not that he needed the encouragement. Shouts and fighting exploded on the edges of camp. Cold morning air made his teeth ache. His head ached. His stomach growled. He snatched up his revolver and made for the back of the tent.

“Go, go!” Simza hefted her worryingly large shotgun. Not that, in the end, it mattered. Moran was there, and his tiger hunter’s eyes spied him disappearing into the woods. They simply bypassed the fighting gypsies to thunder after him en masse. 

Holmes killed two. The gypsies killed six. They hauled him out of Rome in chains, in a carriage. Drugged out of his mind.

He roused just enough to know when they were wrestling him out of the swaying, moving thing and carrying him onto a bigger, only slightly swaying thing. Beyond the railing, he saw a sheet of sparkling blue something...something... _water_ , some neuron in his brain supplied helpfully, yes, water, the sea, it must be the Mediterranean. They were taking him out of Italy.

An interminable time later, he opened his eyes and he thought he saw Sebastian Moran, smoking and brooding in the other cabin bunk. The man said nothing, while Holmes could neither move his arms nor his mouth, so they existed side by side in the laden silence. Looking at each other until Holmes felt his eyes watering from his inability to blink successfully. He thought he heard someone murmur, “Lucky bastard.” Then Moran got up and closed his eyelids for him, and he sank back into darkness.

Much later, whenever he remembered that surreal journey full of dread, he would be able to dimly recall a few more sense-memories - increasingly cold air, someone tucking blankets around him, more transfers and swaying and his lungs burning from lack of oxygen. He wasted a brief moment of lucidity to ask just how much Moriarty was spending on opiates and got another syringe for his trouble. Moran disappeared at some point and another bland keeper replaced him in the carriage, dressed in black, face a pale smudge in the shadows. 

He eventually woke in stages: first, lying stupefied in a nest of blankets in some rattling, clanking vehicle, blinking hazily at the bits of star-strewn sky visible through dark tree branches. Then, being manhandled out of the wagon - his legs just barely supporting his weight, they must have forgone his latest injection to let him sleep the drugs off - and into an unlit portal that echoed with footsteps on stone. Up stone steps, down hallways, quiet and urgent words spoken over his head as he stared at his boots, which stank. Then, drowsing as they stripped his clothes in a dark room and covered him in something soft. Finally, _finally_ being tipped over onto a surface that yielded under his weight, and crisp footsteps receding from his hearing, and closing his eyes to sleep without dreams.

Holmes woke again into an irritatingly bright world, tangled in cloth, shaking and clammy with sweat. He groaned and curled over onto his good side, his hands clenching uselessly on cool sheets. He was murderously thirsty, his arm throbbed, and he buried his face defensively in the pillow against the familiar mad itch that now pounded under his skin. Damnation. Exhaustion on top of starvation on top of clinical withdrawal. He could have told them about the withdrawals, but they'd kept him too drugged to speak, and now his body was clamoring at the door with its debtors' receipts. 

Other urges asserted themselves, too. He unfolded himself slowly, just barely able to roll himself off the bed, landing painfully on some gaudy Persian rug. He needed his seven percent solution; God, he needed it so badly. He needed Watson to sit by him and scold him and feed him tea and coca leaves and exasperation. He needed to crawl over the stone floor and haul himself up by an armchair and stumble out the door into what turned out to be a room with a commode and a silver basin full of water. He managed to control his shaking hands long enough to get his drawstring trousers down to relieve himself and then get the trousers back up again. 

He realized that he had huddled into a heap, leaning against the doorway, only when strong hands were pulling him up by the shoulders and supporting his weight as they travelled back to the bedroom. 

"Your hospitality is particularly touching, considering," Holmes ground out through his teeth, not allowing them to chatter. The hands deposited him on the bed, then left his field of vision. They returned moment later with a glass of sweet, blessed water. 

"A distressed guest is a sign of a poor host," James Moriarty said, tilting Holmes's head back and pouring the water down his throat. He drank quickly, his throat grateful even if his mind was emphatically not, and he suffered himself to be eased back under the warm, dry covers. Moriarty's hands smoothed the duvet over him and trailed a gentle caress over Holmes's temples. He was dressed in another suit of linen nearly identical to what Holmes wore.

"Rest. You're useless to me otherwise," Moriarty murmured, and stroked his hair while Holmes curled his hands into fists. Intolerable. Holmes forced himself to escape into sleep.

He woke sometime around sunset, the dying light pouring in through his scrunched eyelids. Around the time when Watson spoke to him, seated by one of the side tables. 

"You do know that what you're on was meant for eye surgery?" The doctor sounded amused.

"Impossible," Holmes croaked. "I took great pains to render myself immune to that. You were there, if I recall. Anyhow, it wasn't that, it was some combination of opiates and a strengthened soporific, do try to keep up. "

The other man sighed. "At least you're not brutalizing yourself in the Punch Bowl this time." Holmes's eyes unfocused, focused, and Watson flickered.

"You wound me, Watson." 

"No more than you ever wounded yourself, Holmes," Watson's voice faded in the distance, and Holmes rolled himself over, resolutely facing away from table and window. He hoped that this would conclude the hallucination portion of the evening; alas, footsteps in the hallway disturbed his hearing. Expensive shoe leather and-- chalk dust. Holmes shut his eyes.

The smell of beef and vegetable soup preceded Moriarty’s entrance and Holmes’s stomach provided a favorable opinion. He pressed his face to the pillow and smoothed his breathing. He didn’t doubt that Moriarty would see through it, but it was the principle of the damn thing.

“Your body will process the drugs more quickly with sufficient nourishment to spur it on,” Moriarty said, quite reasonably. Holmes remained still. Click of porcelain against wood as Moriarty set the bowl down on the table. Footsteps approaching. Every hair on his neck standing on end. First touch of a hand to the back of his head. Surging up and forward, colliding foreheads with a crack that had him seeing stars. Falling out of the bed in a tangle of limbs. Landing hard on the ground on a warm human body, struggling upright, unyielding arm wrapping around his neck, hard slam on stone floor, breath exiting his lungs in a rush. Moriarty leaned down on Holmes’s throat, hard, and he struggled furiously against the clanging gongs of pain in his head.

“You may find it more satisfying to try that when you’re not half-starved and ill,” Moriarty panted. Holmes waited for the knee to the stomach or the ribs, bracing for impact.

It didn’t come. "Now. Will you continue to resist? Or," Moriarty pressed his thumb and forefinger to the nerve cluster in Holmes's neck, causing two great globes of pain to burst in Holmes's vision, "will you allow me to care for you as I wish?"

Holmes couldn't bring himself to say the words, to capitulate even that much. But his body was fast succumbing to complete exhaustion and further resistance now would be thoroughly futile. He went limp.

"I thought so," Moriarty said quietly. His breathing wasn't even labored.

For a second time, Holmes suffered himself to be put to bed and caressed like a child. At least the bastard allowed him enough dignity to feed himself instead of spooning it to him like an idiot. The soup was delicious, the beef prime and vegetables tender. Holmes glared at the bottom of the bowl and calculated the odds of being able to launch the bowl at Moriarty, distracting him with hot liquid and flying porcelain, and subduing him successfully. The odds were low. Moriarty took the bowl away.

"Sleep. You still require rest," the other man told him and kissed him on the temple before leaving. Holmes rested his face in his hands. 

He knew the look in the other man's eyes. Had seen it from the first months-ago appointment at the college - intrigue, fascination, frank appraisal more suitable to a gentleman's club than a professor's office - and again during that fateful chess match. It mattered little at the time besides as another data entry in his calculations. Left alone, imprisoned, weakened and at Moriarty's mercy, the memory now occupied Holmes's thoughts rather more fully. He shut his eyes to disturbing reflections of industrial hooks, until exhaustion and pain conspired to send him to sleep.


End file.
